Fish of the Day is Banker’s Bass

The Obama administration will soon announce regulations to make it easier for banks to do business with legal marijuana sellers, Attorney General Eric Holder said Thursday.

“You don’t want just huge amounts of cash in these places. They want to be able to use the banking system,” Holder said during an appearance at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. “There’s a public safety component to this. Huge amounts of cash—substantial amounts of cash just kind of lying around with no place for it to be appropriately deposited is something that would worry me, just from a law enforcement perspective.”

I linked two pieces yesterday discussing the arrant hypocrisy of allowing every major international bank to launder billions in cartel money while also permitting every bank in Colorado to turn away legal, legitimate, cannabis businesses. Well, the effects of legalisation are already being felt; the sheer turn-over of the first two weeks has forced Holder to move much more quickly on the banking issue than anyone saw coming.

“We’re in the process now of working with our colleagues at the Treasury Department to come up with regulations that will deal with this issue,” Holder said. He added that the new rules were likely to emerge “very soon” and were not intended to amount to a blessing of marijuana by the federal government. “It is an attempt to deal with a reality that exists in these states,” he said.

My emphasis. This is why legalisation from below is such a good idea in a Madisonian democracy.